The Astonishing X-Men save the world (maybe) by phoning a friend with a space gun in the literally explosive conclusion to the "Ghost Boxes" story arc. And sadly, it's not nearly as ridiculous as it sounds.
Writer Warren Ellis, since taking over Astonishing from Joss Whedon, has had the X-Men's alpha team investigating a covert conflict between mutants from a parallel reality and artificial pseudo-mutants created in this one. (Still not that ridiculous. No, really. It's all about the hard sci-fi execution; Ellis is a master of semi-plausible technobabble.) By this issue, they've tracked the pseudo-mutants back to their creator: former teammate Forge, who has apparently fallen off the sanity wagon again. Having found an open gateway to the other mutants' parallel reality, he's been using his mutants to fight against the alternates, who he insists are scoping our reality out for conquest. He's gone so far as to build another gateway himself, and is preparing to send a whole army of his Nutrasweet X-Men through to the parallel world to wipe out the potential invaders. So Hank "Beast" McCoy calls his girlfriend Abigail Brand, a S.W.O.R.D. agent who lives on a space station and defends Earth against alien invasions for a living, and has her blast a superlaser through the interdimensional gateway just in case.
"Just in case," are pretty close to Hank's own words. They can't take the chance, he says, that Forge might be wrong. So rather than risk another invasion - and how many of those have the X-Men fought off in the last six months, let alone the rest of Marvel's heroes? - they shoot a space gun down the rabbit hole. A space gun, Hank explains, that will "turn to foam" every living being and building in a ten-mile radius around whatever's on the other side. Essentially, Hank's lady friend dropped an atomic bomb on the X-Men's problems. On the possibility of future problems, really.
The metaphor for current world events and military tactics is so obvious it's practically a Looney Tunes anvil chorus. In the age of terror, with modern technology and weaponry, we don't wait for the invasions any more. We commit terrible acts from afar in the hopes of preventing or forestalling even more terrible acts in the future. We make the hard choices, blah blah blah preemptive-strike cakes.
But this is NOT the X-Men's metaphor. Comic book superheroes in general, for all the problems they solve by fisticuffs, have been telling us for years that killing bad guys is unnecessary. That it's better to face the same rogues again and again than to give up on the possibility of human redemption. Because by killing the bad guys, we become no better than them. Because killing begets killing, and the cycle can only stop if we stop it. Because some rogues will see the light and become heroes called Rogue. They're ancient, tired, cliched ideals, but I still believe in them. That's why I'm a comic book fan. I like my superheroes old school, Gandhis who punch people really hard.
I'm not saying every superhero has to be a Gandhi, but the X-Men always have been. The X-Men are symbols of hope and evolution. They embody the idea that you don't have to get bitten by a radioactive plot device to be a Punching Gandhi, you might just have been born that way. Maybe you're a freak and nobody likes you because secretly you're that awesome. Awesome enough to love the world that hates and fears you, even if you have to punch it sometimes. Or at least, that's how it used to work.
Ever since Grant Morrison's New X-Men, the X-Men have been increasingly isolated from the world, finding less in common with the rest of humanity. They've been making darker choices. They've abandoned Xavier's dream of peaceful coexistance with humanity in favor of a war to survive. And that saddens me, because there are plenty of other superheroes out there to explore war-on-terror metaphors and issues of idealism vs. expediency. (The Punisher, for instance, or Ellis' own creations over in The Authority.) I'm not saying there shouldn't be X-Men stories about these things, but they shouldn't be at the center of the X-Men's ongoing mission. Marvel's mutants have a message of their own, a really special and important one.
If the X-Men are going to make these terribly dark, hard, "modern" choices, then they need to be earned. I should be convinced that there was no better way, rather than feeling like they took an easy out at the expense of ten square miles of possibly innocent alien civilians. Someday, I'd really like to see the X-Men acting like heroes again, not nuking other people's realities because they took the crazy guy's word for it.
- JC
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